Hardware Podcast 11 - Laptop On Fire

It's been a while, we'll give you that, but the hardware podcast is back in town with a jam-packed eleventh episode. Alex, Harry, James and Antony sit down to discuss everything that's happened in the world of hardware since we were last on air.

We begin with Fermi, specifically the rumours that Nvidia is aggressively trying to expand its range by launching a mobile version of its new GPU. How will such a hot chip run in a laptop though?

Next up, we talk about Intel and AMD's new CPUs, including the six-core AMD Phenom II X6 1090T, and Harry goes deep into SSDs. Rebranding, new controller chips and the question of whether all the manufacturers are missing the obvious are all addressed.

Finally, we answer some reader mail and speculate about which keyboard Scarlett Johansson prefers to use.

As usual, you can also win a tat bag choice selection of quality branded merchandise by correctly guessing what mystery item of hardware we're talking about this episode – send your guesses to podcast [at] custompc [dot] co [dot] uk with the subject line ‘Hardware 11’.

As ever, thanks to Brad Sucks for providing the theme song - it's actually his track, Dropping Out of School.

for Fermi cards: to be honest, Crysis is old news, we should only be looking at Dx11 titles for Dx11 cards. in Dx11 games, these nVidia cards does keep up very well. 470 is about same speed as 5870, which in America's price, it's very competitive.

totally agree with instructions per clock thing. clock-for-clock is incredibly important when all similarly priced CPU's can now be clocked to around 4Ghz speed.

what people didn't realise with SSD is that it's not about sequential read speed. it's more about responsiveness of the system, able to open programs as soon as you click on them, and not hearing a peep from the computer

on the point of upgrading for Dx11, i did for Bad Company 2 and Aliens vs Predator. totally worth it!

I'm afraid I have absolutely no connections within the computer industry - it was simply a matter of pre-ordering the cards as soon as they appeared. Speaking of which, I now qualify for a free gift from Zotac as I have at least two Zotac products!

As for noise, I've already mentioned that in my mini review. Anyone who doesn't have headphones and has more than one card directly next to another will need watercooling though (unless they play with the volume on 11). I'm also modding the side of my case to have four Gentle Typhoons blowing on the 480s - that should help the heat when I actually have the side on.

One thing about Crysis: I'm sure the more tech savvy among you will realise that it actually implements its own version of DX11 on the higher settings for certain textures. Of course, because it isn't actually DX11, the new cards can't take advantage of this. Hopefully Crysis 2 will have proper DX11 implementation.

In regards to SSDs, I don't have one because a) I can't be bothered to reinstall everything, b) I have A LOT of games installed (509GB, not including ones which are in funny places) and c) the cost per GB is still a joke.

I completely agree with you guys about the 470 (the 'what am I doing here?' comment made me grin). Until it's priced in the same ballpark as the 5850, it simply isn't any use. Even in an SLI configuration, it's very hard to argue for it.